Until the Break of Day

Recall what we said there about gus am bris an la (until daybreak or the break of day) and its apocalyptic resonance. The epigraph is often read as a salute to Nietzsche’s text of the same name that celebrates a new way of thinking and living after rationalistic modernity has run aground. Given how Nietzsche’s diagnostics of modernity is put to use in the second part of After Virtue, the association has support. Yet, the Nietzsche association cannot really explain the recourse to Gaelic. Something in excess of Nietzsche is indicated by the recourse to the Gaelic language in which MacIntyre was proficient. …

The unabbreviated saying is as follows: Gus am bris an la agud an teich na ngaillean. This allows us to see that MacIntyre is being biblical and incredibly poignant at once. First, the whole phrase is a Scotish Gaelic translation of a passage from the Song of Songs (4:6; see also 2:17): “Until the day breaks and the shadows flee away.” In the Christian use of the phrase in Scotland it bore on Christian burial and hope. It was a commonplace on gravestones in Gaelic speaking areas in Scotland and pointed to the last judgment and the resurrection of the dead, one example of which are the gravestones of the soldiers who died in droves in the trenches in WWI at the battle of the Somme that MacIntyre mentions apparently in passing in After Virtue. Not a few of the myriad Scottish dead had the name Alasdair. This makes clearer that MacIntyre’s epigraph is essentially both epitaph and protest, against war but also against a modernity that is not only Eliot’s “heap of broken images” but the land of death or the dead, the dead in ethos as well as body.

https://churchlifejournal.nd.edu/articles/macintyre-and-newman-outlining-a-conversation/

According to the article cited, by Cyril O’Regan on St John Henry Newman and Alasdair MacIntyre, “daybreak” in the epigraph, to the Gaelic mind, has a more eschatological connotation than it does in English:

As a Celt, with allegiances to both Ireland and Scotland, MacIntyre has a more dynamic and eschatological sense of daybreak than plain English “dawn” might allow, perhaps something like Morgenröte in German (morning redness). The word in German is both more literal—as is the Gaelic—and more eschatological, as figures such as Jacob Boehme (1575-1624) and Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900) both testify, one at the very beginning of the modern age, the other at what he perceives to be its end and productive nadir.

There is more here in a tribute article to MacIntyre, who died in May 2025 after a long and sometimes controversial intellectual journey that included a conversion to Catholicism after studying the works of Aristotle.

I don’t have much more to say. The verse from Song of Songs rendered in Gaelic makes me think of Advent, this last few days before the Nativity, heralded by prophecies and an orient star and the infanticidal rage of kings.

I never noticed it before, but the passage from MacBeth “Night thickens; and the crow…” is almost a reversal of the Song of Songs passages. I wonder if this is intentional — perhaps not, but the play’s trajectory does work toward it and of course MacBeth is a Scot too. Interesting, but I will leave it for now.